Category — Open Source

Xeeber is one more service that allows you to detect invisible yahoo messenger users. I have not used Xeeber myself yet. Have you used Xeeber? Please leave a comment stating your experience with the service.

Pligg version 9.5.5 has been released. It is expected to fix security hole that was reported recently. You can find more details of the release at http://forums.pligg.com/current-version/14301-pligg-beta-9-9-5-a.html

Most of the useful sites like gmail,yahoo,orkut are banned in my office. That is what prompted me to search for a proxy site. The first proxy site that I started to use was yoyahoo.com. However the IT department was uncharecteristically fast to shut down this proxy site as well. So I continued my search and prepared a list of gmail proxy sites.

During this reseach I realized that one can create a proxy of his own, put in some advertisement with adsense and make good amount of money. In this post I list some open source code that can e used to create a good proxy site.

HTTP/FTP Proxy in a CGI Script
A Simple Http Proxy Server
Java FTP Proxy Server

While reading about Ubuntu on Wikipedia , I came across this huge list of Linux distributions on Wikipedia. I never knew there were so so many of them…

You may like to read this post where I have tried to explain what a Linux distro is by giving an analogy to pizzas.

Do you want to resize your hard disk partitions without removing your current installed operating system? Do you want to create new partitions again without destroying your current operating system?
Do you want to install a second operating system? Or you computer refuses to boot and gives messages like “NTLDR missing” or “no bootable media found” (not exactly same messages…I don’t remember the exact ones )…
Well there’s a nice solution to all these...GParted (GNOME partition editor) .
It has three versions… installable, liveCD and liveUSB. I found the liveCD really good because using it you boot your system from the CD and not from the HDD so even if your OS gets corrupted you can use it . Also it has a very simple to use and intuitive GUI.
You can read more about GParted, Download it, check its screenshots here at its home-page.

March 1, 2008 was a historical day in the history of web browsing. Official support for all Netscape client products was removed .

Also another big current news in the browser world is that Firefox has crossed the 500 million downloads milestone. Read below and you will know why…

Recently I have been working on some javascript codes and for testing I tried six common browsers. Here I would like to present a comparison of these five browsers. The browsers I tested are

1. Mozilla-Firefox 2.0 (Windows and Linux (It’s called Iceweasel on Debian))
2. Opera 9.26(Linux)
3. Netscape 9(Windows and Linux)
4. Flock 1.1 (Linux)
5.1. Internet Explorer 5 (Windows)
5.2. Internet Explorer 7 (Windows)
6. Epiphany (Linux)

PS: The list misses Apple’s Safari browser. I don’t have a Mac yet and Safari for Windows sucks so much that I did not even bother to test it. (Sorry, Apple fanboys)

Internet Explorer 5 is now a stone age browser. It doesn’t support .png images and has limited support for javascript … In simple terms you cannot get those beautiful, translucent images and cool animated effects (which are now so much a part of any website). It does not have tabbed browsing and is really slow. For all of you who are still on IE5 I beg you to please switch over to firefox or atleast IE7.

Next in line IE7. Well it’s somewhat better than IE5 but practically again a nuisance. No doubt it is fast, has tabbed browsing, Support for various image formats (transparency included), better support for javascript BUT the problem lies in its security. It is too secure to use … won’t open anything you use Internet for, mostly . You can compare its security to a building without a boundary wall but a big gate with a big lock !!! And yes, there are still issues with javascript … Mr. Ballmer please understand that not all coders work for MS and if not support Open Source atleast live in harmony with it.

Opera is a good browser (for Linux users) if you are able to install it. I use Debian etch . I downloaded the debian package , installed it, ran it and booooom …. My CPU fan started shouting at me… had to kill the opera process. Then I downloaded the source code and ran the script without installing (installing from the source code was also useless) … it worked fine but your PWD must be the directory where the script is present . I had to tweak the script a bit to get it working from anywhere. Once you get Opera working you will love it .

Epiphany … Don’t even think about it … It’s a counterpart for IE5 ….OK, a little better.

Flock is a young browser … I did not play much with it but it is recommended by our old experienced , late Netscape so I trust it is good .

Netscape is awesome but unfortunately there is no more official support for it … so it’s not the browser of the future. Now the Netscape users are recommended to use Firefox or Flock.

Finally, Mozilla-Firefox is a clear winner… With a huge community support and so many useful plugins (more than 2000) and such a good support for almost anything there is no doubt that it is the best.

Happy browsing !

GDB (Acronym for GNU debugger) is considered to be one of the best debuggers among the geek community. i generally prefer debugging my programs without any debugging tools , i.e by mental inspection and printf()s. I feel this is the best approach for a student…It makes you learn a lot. But when you have to debug a more than 1000 lines code and you have deadlines to meet you practically can’t do without a debugger.
GDB is a command line based tool but really powerful and helpful.
I found a great comprehensive tutorial on GDB here ( http://www.dirac.org/linux/gdb/ )
PS: don’t leave chapter 2 of this tutorial. Even if you don’t want to learn about gdb, still read chapter 2 of this tutorial …. Read it to know why.

Hail GNU !!!

There’s been lot of hue and cry about open source in past few years in the technical world. Whatever technical forums or blogs or news you see has some story on open source every day. Some people think open source is the best thing and they want o go open source (though many of them don’t even know the true meaning of open source!) and there are some who think it’s something bad (may be just because they don’t know what it is!).

I would like to explain what I came to know about open source in past three years and what I think about it. (Please beware that all ideas expressed in this article are my personal views, don’t be simply guided by them and believe in what you think … Everyone’s free to believe in and do what one thinks, that’s one of the features of open source).

Do you know the recipe of Coke? I am sure you don’t. Nobody knows (except for the people who make it) because the Coca-Cola company does not tell anyone how they make it . But I am sure you know how to make a good lemonade (lime juice or shikanji or neembu paani) … If you don’t know please first go and ask your mom how to make it, make one and then swallow this article with it .

So, we can’t make Coke at our home but we can make lemonade (probably a better one than sold by a few multi-national companies).
Now let us look at some other facts related to Coke and lemonade…
We pay approximately 20 Indian bucks for 500 ml of coke bottle (you may pay upto 30 Indian bucks for the same thing if you buy it at a multiplex). Making 500 ml of lemonade won’t cost more than 7 or 8 Indian bucks (just the cost of two lemons and some sugar, water is free).
We always get coke as it is, wherever we buy it. Yes we can add stuff to it to change its taste but the basic thing remains same…though most of us won’t mess with a 20 bucks cost (probably not worth) thing. But in case of lemonade we are free to modify its recipe as we like… choose the number of lemons, quantity of sugar, type of lemons, etc. We have to trust the Coke company when they say that they use clean water and ingredients that don’t harm our health. There’s no other way to know the truth unless you know a food inspector who won’t take bribe. But in case of lemonade we always know how good or bad the ingredients are that are used.

I guess by now you think that I want to say that lemonade is open source and coke is closed source. Yes you are right if you think so. Lemonade is open source because the recipe(the source ) of lemonade is known to all and coke is closed source because we don’t know how it is made.

Since this article is on BinaryDay, a few technical words…

Comparing the above to software industry, an open source software is one for which the users know the source code written in C, Java or any of the hundreds of computer languages (the recipe) of the software and closed source software in which you get the compiled executable file but you don’t know the source code (the recipe) of the software…You know what it does but you don’t know how it does.

There’s a very common question that people ask . “How to make money with open source?”
Most people’s answer to this question is a very moral one… “Not every work should be done for money”… True, but how practical is it? Not at all. What’s the point in burning your brains out when you can’t buy even a laptop or a bike? The philosophy of open source does not stop one from making money. People generally take free software to be free in the sense of “Buy two, get one free”. That’s not the correct meaning . The “free” in free software is free in the sense of “freedom”.

Let me again bring in some coke and lemonade to explain the money part and the freedom part of open source.
First the money part. We all know how to make lemonade but still we buy it in a shop or order it in a restaurant.(I guess lime juice is the most sold thing (in terms of quantity) in our college canteen!). We all buy a thing which we know how to make (sometimes even better than what we buy) because due to some reason or the other we can’t always make it ourselves.

Consider one more thing. If you make your lemonade yourself there’s no guarantee that every time you make it, it’s equally good. But a good restaurant can guarantee that and that’s one of the things they charge for.
Similar is the case with Software. Companies buy software just as we buy lemonade. But why will a company buy open source software rather than a closed source software? (Or why will I buy lemonade rather than Coke?) The answer is below in the freedom part.

If we order lemonade in a good restaurant we can always ask the waiter to tell the person who prepares lemonade to add less/more sugar or to add a pinch of salt or to add extra lime juice, etc. The point is that we can get it customized according to our taste. Whereas in case of coke we don’t have such “freedom”. That’s one of the reasons why I prefer lemonade and former President of the Republic of India, Dr. A.P.J Abdul Kalam prefers Open Source software for the Indian Armed Forces.

There’s one more issue I would like to discuss.
When we make lemonade for the first time, or bake a cake for the first time or for that matter cook anything new, we always ask for help from someone, mostly our mother (all mothers are expert cooks, that’s why we have so much good food in the world), who knows to make it or knows to make something similar (in case you are creative with food and try new recipes). When we have made our new recipe we want everyone we know to try it out (We don’t charge them). If our new recipe is good enough and people like it, it’s very likely that they want you to make it again and again and if it’s really great you may end up making money by teaching the chefs of a five start hotel how to make it.
Same is the case with software, you always get help from people in the online forums. You make a new software and give it to people to try it and if your software is real good, it may be the next MySQL (MySQL is the world’s most famous database software, it is open source and was bought by Sun Microsystems a few days ago).
That’s how somebody once made a burger and Linus Torvaldz made Linux !!!

Food and Software are so similar, aren’t they?